Archive

Quotes

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

—Mao Zedong, 1938

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

—Anacharsis, c. 550 BC

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

—Dean Acheson, 1970